Cultural Appropriation and the Practice of History

      No Comments on Cultural Appropriation and the Practice of History

By Andrew Nurse

I will confess that I am haunted by Marius Barbeau, the twentieth century anthropologist and folklorist, about whom I wrote my doctoral dissertation. Barbeau has done a lot for me. He’s helped build my CV because I’ve written — perhaps, some might say, too much — a good deal about him. He got me my job. Indeed, my “job talk” was an exploration of the issues his work raised for Canadian cultural history. He’s gotten me invited to conferences, led to offers of collaboration, brought me books to review, helped me meet colleagues at faculty seminars where I’ve talked about him and, I am certain, gotten me promoted. He is responsible, in large measure, for those step pay raises we, as faculty, receive over the years.

Marius Barbeau

One of the things I learnt from Barbeau was how not to interact with Indigenous cultures. I learnt about power and voice and what happens when Indigenous people cannot speak in their own names because their voices will be ignored while their culture is displayed in museums or at tourist sites. I learnt, in short, about cultural appropriation. But, that learning has only brought with it more questions. Continue reading →

History Slam Episode 105: Shadow Red

      2 Comments on History Slam Episode 105: Shadow Red

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

By Sean Graham

2017 is the 100th anniversary of Tom Thomson’s death. Earlier this year, I talked with Gregory Klages about Thomson’s death and the many theories that have surrounded it for the past century. But that’s not all that’s been going on to mark the event. Last Thursday, a new art exhibition opened at Toronto’s ArteMbassy entitled Shadow Red. For the past three years, artist Martha Johnson has put together a series of works that pay homage to Thomson’s life and legacy.

In this episode of the History Slam, I talk with Martha Johnson about the exhibit. We chat about her personal connection to Tom Thomson, his legacy in Canada’s art community, and her artistic style. We also talk about the exhibit, using blankets as a canvas, what visitors can expect, and how nature has influenced Canadian art. The exhibit runs through October 1, so if you’re in the GTA, it’s definitely worth the trip.

Continue reading →

MISHI 2017 Reflections: Bridging Land, Ideas, Generations, Worlds

      2 Comments on MISHI 2017 Reflections: Bridging Land, Ideas, Generations, Worlds

By Victoria Jackson, Daniel Murchison, and Carolyn Podruchny

Editors Note: This is the first in a monthly series of reports from MISHI 2017, a partner in Active History.

We thought there were only two ways on and off Manitoulin Island: driving over the Little Current Swing Bridge along Highway 6 on the north shore, or arriving at South Baymouth on the south shore via the MS Chi-Cheemaun ferry from Tobermory on the tip of the Bruce Peninsula. We were wrong. The “Manitoulin Island Summer Historical Institute (MISHI) 2017: Does Wisdom Sit in Places? Sites as Sources of Knowledge,” a five-day summer institute held from August 14-18, 2017, taught us that the wisdom and knowledge on Manitoulin Island travels over many bridges.

MISHI 2017 focused on understanding how place-based knowledge shapes an Anishinaabe-centred history of Manitoulin Island and its environs. Co-sponsored by the History of Indigenous Peoples (HIP) Network, a research cluster embedded within the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies at York University, and the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation (OCF), an organization devoted to Anishinaabe history and culture, the summer institute brought together 25 established and emerging historians, graduate students, administrators, artists, Elders, and knowledge-keepers to explore the history through landscapes, stories, and documents. The OCF represents six First Nations (Aundek Omni Kaning, M’Chigeeng, Sheguiandah, Sheshegwaning, Whitefish River, and Zhiibaahaasing) and is dedicated to nourishing and preserving Anishinaabe history, arts, language, and spirituality. MISHI seeks to break down historically, socially, and spatially made boundaries between knowledge systems, people, and communities for the purposes of engagement with Manitoulin’s Anishinaabeg-centered history and culture. MISHI 2017 ended up being a lesson in building bridges. Continue reading →

The Hubris of Academe, or, “Students Suck”

      4 Comments on The Hubris of Academe, or, “Students Suck”

By Elise Chenier

There are few moments in life as self-defining as being awarded a PhD. I got mine in 2001 from Queen’s University, one of Canada’s “top” schools. The ceremony required me to kneel before the Chancellor who tapped me once on each shoulder with his mortarboard. It did its magic. When I stood up and crossed that stage, I felt I occupied more space—literally. For the next ten years or so (okay, fifteen) I would occasionally get agitated when people did not give way when I passed them. Such is the hubris of academe.

One of the most disappointing manifestations of such hubris is the lamentation about “students today,” a weed that re-seeds every fall when university professors decry the atrocious behaviour of the hordes of ignorant, lazy, impolite students they are burdened with the task of teaching.

Lynn Crosbie’s contribution to this genre in a 2015 issue of Macleans, which recently made the rounds again in celebration of September, is just one example. Written in the epistolary form, she exhorts her students to sit neither in the front nor the back of the classroom, to refrain from bringing “ham bones and pungent noodles” to lecture, and to “give a thought to arriving prepared, with the syllabus read, and the correct texts in hand.” Just in case students still don’t get just where they stand in relationship to the instructor, we are told:

During the student work, I sit in the back row, draw, mutter, and look irritated: How wonderfully frightened you all look from my place, at the head of a group of strangers I am pushing, slowly and cautiously, toward a unified, politicized and knowledgeable student body.

Her unconventional and erratic teaching style is defended on the grounds that she offers students “their first sweet taste of moving out of mom and dad’s orbit, and they are feeling all of the joy that being very young, poor and free entails.”

I get that the piece exaggerates to be provocative and strives to be funny, but I don’t find it to be either. Like every other “students suck” piece out there, it is mean, insulting, and arrogant, and it misrepresents the vast majority of professors and instructors I have encountered in my professional life.

I have spent most of my career in the History Department at Simon Fraser University. Students are largely from lower to middle-income families and attended a public school in the surrounding region. Many hold down one or more part-time jobs, and often are responsible for the care of family members, and sometimes have children of their own. Continue reading →

The Use and Abuse of Boredom

      2 Comments on The Use and Abuse of Boredom

By David Tough

This is the final essay in a five part theme week marking the centenary of income tax in Canada.

It’s like clockwork. Every time I tell someone I’m writing a book on the history of income taxation, the conversation plays out with eerie consistency. First, they say that the topic sounds painfully dull, and chuckle. Then they say that they had heard that income taxation was introduced as a temporary tax – then another chuckle – to pay for the First World War.

If I explain that income taxation was introduced during the war, but had more to do with dulling opposition to conscription than paying for the war, and that income taxation was actually a popular measure the government was reluctant to introduce, and that popular demand for some sort of direct tax, one that would weigh more heavily on the rich and lighten the tax burden on the average citizen, had been loudly expressed in the election of 1911, they invariably ask why I decided to study such an obscure question.

Income taxation is a central fact of modern political life, Continue reading →

The Family as Tax Dodge, Again

      No Comments on The Family as Tax Dodge, Again

By Shirley Tillotson

This is the fourth in a five part theme week marking the centenary of income tax in Canada.

Here we are again. If you’ve studied history or lived a decade or two after forty, you’ve noticed that some battles are fought over and over and over again. Those repetitive, “I can’t believe we’re still debating this!” struggles mark itchy, scratchy places in our society, the places where the imperatives of institutions and “common sense,” markets and human needs contradict each other. So “same old, same old” really means “this is hot stuff.” In the history of the income tax, much of the hot stuff shows up around family. And sure enough, family matters appear in the federal government’s current proposals to make income taxation more fair. One aspect of the Morneau proposals targets the use of the breadwinner / homemaker / children family as a tax dodge. Or, to be less provocative, one might say the proposals target the use of one kind of family as a means to minimize tax, perfectly legal. Opposition MP Michelle Rempel moans, how can a government “change the rules” and call the change “fair”? Is the finance minister calling people who follow the rules “crooks”?

Amid all this heat, a bit of tax history might be calming. The distinction between what is avoidance – legal – and what is evasion – illegal – has changed before, and will no doubt change again. Rempel presents herself as defending law-abiding folk who face the shutting down of ordinary good business practices, ways of saving and spending that are both legitimate and socially useful. But those practices are not natural rights. They are more like tactics in a sport. They are merely ways of using current law to the taxpayer’s best advantage: tax avoidance practices, also called tax planning. As the world changes, so may tax law, in the future as it has in the past. The boundary between avoidance and evasion is historical, driven by events and our responses to them. Continue reading →

History Slam Episode 104: Taxation and Democracy

      1 Comment on History Slam Episode 104: Taxation and Democracy

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

By Sean Graham

In this episode of the History Slam, which is a special bonus episode as part of Activehistory.ca’s taxation week, I talk Shirley Tillotson of Dalhousie University. We chat about her new book Give and Take: The Citizen-Taxpayer and the Rise of Canadian Democracy, Elsbeth Heaman’s new book Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917, and the role of taxes in Canadian life. We also talk about how taxation has been written about by historians, the merits of a flat tax, and how people feel about government spending.

Continue reading →

Canada’s Controversial Income Tax

      No Comments on Canada’s Controversial Income Tax

By Shirley Tillotson

This is the third in a five part theme week marking the centenary of income tax in Canada.

Calm fiscal reasoning was hard to summon up amidst the intense emotions of 1917. Demands for taxes on profits, high incomes, and wealth were fuelled by anger that was about not only fair public finance,  but also broader patterns in the distribution of wealth. In 1917, Canadians got a federal tax on income – but wealth remained safe.

In fact, as Sir Thomas White’s political opponents would soon realize, in legislating the income tax at that particular moment, he had cannily helped big investors to an extra good return on some of their wealth, namely the large quantities of war bonds they would buy in the first Victory loan drive of November 1917. Income from those bonds would be tax-exempt. In the interwar debates about the future of the federal income tax, those tax-free bonds would play the role that “gold-plated government pensions” do today: a red flag of taxpayer resentment. Income tax controversies would continue to swirl and churn, in particularly Canadian ways. Continue reading →

What does the coming of income tax tell us about “fairness” in 1917?

      1 Comment on What does the coming of income tax tell us about “fairness” in 1917?

By E.A. Heaman

This is the second in a five part theme week marking the centenary of income tax in Canada.

Robert Borden’s government introduced income tax in 1917 because Canadians wanted a fairer system of taxation than they had. How unCanadian of them! According to Margaret Wente (writing about Thomas Piketty’s egalitarian economics), Canadians have never been interested in inequality. “They simply don’t perceive a problem… The obsession with inequality is overwhelmingly a concern of the liberal policy elites – the people who live in rich liberal coastal states, or Toronto’s Annex, or Ottawa’s Glebe.” Wente mocked “a bunch of experts,” the Toronto Star, and the CBC for weighing in on the data and suggested that the real social divide in Canada may not be rich versus poor but policy elites versus masses.[1]

So what happened in 1917? Was it an embarrassing moment when the wonks triumphed over common sense? Or is she wrong about Canadians and inequality? Wente’s skepticism is a salutary one: it encourages us to revisit those events and try to understand what was special about the relationship between policy, public opinion, and fairness in that exceptional year.

Certainly 1917 was exceptional. Continue reading →

When Income Tax Was Like a Fire

      2 Comments on When Income Tax Was Like a Fire

By David Tough

This is the first in a five part theme week marking the centenary of income tax in Canada.

This summer, on the 100th anniversary of the passing of Income War Tax, I’ve seen the same fable repeated half a dozen times. No, it wasn’t a temporary tax, and no, it wasn’t introduced to pay for the First World War. It was introduced to win over a particularly difficult section of the public, one whose opposition to the war and to the economic system it was being fought to protect was growing rapidly.

More to the point, income taxation wasn’t brought in by an overzealous government using the war as a pretext for a money grab. The people wanted income taxation, and welcomed it as better than consumption taxes. Organized farmers and workers in particular wanted it, and campaigned relentlessly for it in their newspapers. It was the government that was resistant, but they had no choice: their feet were to the fire. Continue reading →